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Posted by enraged_camel 13 hours ago

Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions(twitter.com)
https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...

https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mg...

807 points | 549 commentspage 3
sebgr 4 hours ago|
this makes sense, in 2018-2022, I would get tons of emails from recruiters at meta, doordash, snap, stripe etc now I barely see any (maybe they've given up )

My friends who are still at Google also say that most job postings will end up going to someone internally - in fact people say they don't do that many external interviews anymore.

Finally the interview cycle seems to take a lot longer than I remember with quite a few added rounds.

broknbottle 5 hours ago||
This is a culling and the fake it until you make it crowd that focused on surface level only knowledge are finding out why they should have went deeper. The ones that honed their craft and really focused on the foundational and core stuff are in demand.
vicchenai 6 hours ago||
Anecdotally seeing this play out in SF right now. We're hiring for our fintech startup and getting 500+ applications per role, many from people at companies I would've assumed were stable. A year ago we struggled to get anyone to even look at us. The talent pool is incredible but man it feels weird benefiting from other people's misfortune.
frankbreetz 12 hours ago||
Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors...

"Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year

"Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries"

"Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information.

This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.

I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me?

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

jimbokun 12 hours ago|
"Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service"

It's a weird employment category that includes both Google SWEs and your local librarian.

jmward01 11 hours ago||
A key thing in this graph is that it doesn't seem to correlate to the rise of code assistants. That is a (relatively) recent last year thing from my point of view. Yes, they were there before, but they hadn't really hit in a way that I think hiring decisions had shifted because of them. This is just tech laying off, not AI taking jobs.
palmotea 13 hours ago||
The ideal software engineer will code himself out of a job and be happy about it.

Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!

phendrenad2 1 hour ago||
I prefer to code myself out of a job, and be the shareholder. I'm counting on myself!
locusofself 13 hours ago|||
But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...
palmotea 13 hours ago||
> But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...

Exactly my point. Encourage LLM adoption, faster, faster. Be excited about your homeless future, software engineers!

vaxman 8 hours ago||
Are we in the Cathedral or the Bazaar now? I get that confused. Everyone upload their code to GitHub --keep your truth (philosophically AND mathematically) in the Cloud ;) Oh and don't forget to document your critical thinking, on Slack. It goes much deeper tho.

[cue the POS https://youtu.be/SP-gN1zoI28]

groby_b 12 hours ago||
Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.

So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at.

The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironically, that means they won't be able to code themselves out of a job)

bobanrocky 11 hours ago|||
Are you saying you want to be laid off with a nice package as you’ve been with the same employer for a long time? Couple of options: have a nice conversation with your manager and make this clear. The signs are clear that major s/w layoffs will happen in the next couple of years. Other option is to ease off - your high salary and low output will put you in the dustbin list
bdangubic 10 hours ago||
> your high salary and low output will put you in the dustbin list

you’d think, but in my experience, once you reach high salary - in a lot of places - you can coast for a long time with very little output

palmotea 12 hours ago|||
> Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.

What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"?

My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on about buggy-whip makers).

janalsncm 11 hours ago||
I have been getting automated emails from a slew of different recruiters now. Usually one or two per day. I believe they are LLM generated. However, I usually don’t respond.

The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM is good enough it’ll convince their LLM to skip the interview and just offer me a job.

manoDev 3 hours ago||
I believe it would be interesting to compare to graduates / etc. in the same timeframe.
thcipriani 10 hours ago||
This has a misleading title.

This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020.

But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.

Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows.

(Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))

marginalia_nu 11 hours ago|
Funny how the dip started years before we had meaningful AI codegen.

Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded and invested in.

islandfox100 11 hours ago|
That's because it's a macroecon dip, and the effect of AI on hiring has been greatly pre-empted as excuse
RealityVoid 10 hours ago||
Yes, it's not that the company is doing badly, we're right sizing because of AI!
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